Lodge Complex Continues to Burn, Cool Weather Helps

August 15 morning update:

65 percent containment of 12,336 acres. There are a number of unburned islands within the containment zones which will continue to burn. Heavy smoke is expected to continue and firefighters are concerns about the high pressure system building over the area today and through the weekend. This warming trend and winds could spur the fire activity and embers and burning debris could jump containment lines causing spot fires outside the containment zones. Evacuation orders were downgraded to evacuation warnings.

1,844 fire personnel are still assigned to the fire and cost of firefighting efforts are now at $30.1 million.

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While the Lodge Complex fire continues to burn, reaching 11,900 acres, at 55 percent contained on Thursday morning, firefighters are gaining confidence in their containment lines.

This is leading to more southbound fire engines heading south on Highway 101, as the Lodge Complex's incident command has peeled off about 100 persons to other fires raging across the state. Though the fire broke through containment lines on the eastern edge, and spread to the east, cooler weather and increased humidity have aided firefighters in bringing the fire under control, though smoky skies persist through the area.

Hazardous smoke conditions prevail in the area. Particulate concentrations are considered unhealthy for sensitive groups when visibility is reduced to between 3 and 5 miles; unhealthy for anyone when it is between 1.5 and 2.7 miles; very unhealthy is 1 to 1.25 miles and hazardous to less than 1 mile. One of the first recommendations for smoky conditions is to go indoors and limit the amount of outside air entering the residence.

The Mendocino County Public Health officer has recommended all individuals, especially the elderly, individuals with cardiac or respiratory disease and anyone else who is especially sensitive to air pollution should avoid any outdoor activities during unhealthy smoke concentrations. The elderly and small children in arease of heavy smoke accumulations should consider leaving the smoky area altogether.

The interior sections of the fire will continue to burn even after the fire is contained. In many cases the fire is not actually extinguished until the winter rains. As a result smoke may remain in the area for some time.

Areas on the northern flank of the fire are still under an evacuation order.

Fighting wild fires differs significantly from battling a home fire. In a home fire, firefighters attempt to put out a fire directly, with wildland fires firefighters concentrate on containing a fire's spread, ensuring that it does not move into areas where it might threaten people and structures, or become so big that it gets out of hand.

They do this by building containment lines dictated in a large part on terrain. Sometimes in the most rugged places this means sending in, or even dropping in, hand-crews who cut lines and clear brush by hand. When terrain and road access allow, this could mean sending in bulldozers, generally using existing or old logging roads, to clear a defensible space. Depending again on terrain, this could also mean stringing these dozer lines with hose. In the case of the Lodge Complex Fire this has meant laying 56 miles of hose along ridgelines in remote rugged terrain.

With hose lines, dozer lines and cleared space in place, firefighters will often set small controlled burns to "reduce the fuel load" between their established line and the approaching fire.

These sorts of operations can amount to significant impacts on the land, and when they occur on federally protected, or privately held wilderness, quick decisions have to be made balancing the impact of firefighting operations and the impact of the fire itself.

The Lodge Complex Fire has encroached on the UC Angelo Reserve, a wilderness conservancy owned and managed by UC Berkeley. Firefighters have been closely working with the UC system, through reserve manager Peter Steel, who lives on site, to balance these impacts and ensure that the fire is both fought effectively, and that fire suppression measures minimally harm wilderness areas.

The mixed interests, of regulations and overlapping jurisdictions, from private timberlands to federally protected BLM land, in the words of Steel, "Makes for a very complex decision making process."

Every morning at 10 a.m. CalFire and local departments hold a "cooperators meeting" at the Laytonville firehouse, where representatives of the various agencies share information and plan the day's efforts. Present are representatives from BLM, CalFire, the Mendocino Redwood Company, Campbell Global Timber, the Cahto Tribe, Laytonville Fire, the Laytonville Water District, Cal OES, the Red Cross and the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office.

Steel is enthusiastic about the interaction between local and state officials, "These meetings have been great, there's a lot of good information that's shared back and forth."

At various points in the effort Steel has made different authorizations abou how to proceed within the preserve, but on the whole both Calfire and Steel are happy with their levels of cooperation.

As Koby Johns, a Calfire public information officer explains, "One of the bench marks for us is if the community would have us back."

"So if at the end of this thing the community goes, 'You know what? They kept us informed, they worked with us, they learned our names, they figured out what was important. And you know what, next time we have one of those things we sure hope it's team four.'"

In terms of just what the Angelo Reserve considers when managing fire, Steel explains, "When a fire comes through your natural instinct is to let it burn, because that's a natural process, it's part of nature, and it's a process that has been eliminated in several places by fire suppression. But there's a lot of other considerations like, who your neighbors are, and how long do you want to keep breathing smoke."

The amount of fuel available for fire, which in layman terms just means the amount of brush and trees, is among the most important factors in the intensity and size of a fire.

Prior to large scale suppression efforts forests in Northern California often saw a small brush fire every few decades. These fires had the effect of keeping brush low, and regulating the density and types of trees present.

Fire suppression over the past 100 years has meant that many forests in the state are exceptionally dense with brush. In addition, the mix of saplings and grown trees that have resulted create a kind of ladder effect, where a young sapling growing near an older tree will give fire a way to climb up to the tops of larger trees creating the devastating crown-fires or crown-runs that result in truly huge fires.

Once the fire has been completely contained the full-court press of hundreds of firefighters manning the lines, and pushing back on the fire, will begin to ease, but this doesn't mean that the work is over. The local departments will continue to suppress the fire, using infrared cameras to fly over and look for hotspots which can then be attacked with water dropping helicopters.

After the fire come rehabilitation efforts. The burned out hillsides are more prone to mudslides and erosion, and the dozer lines, necessary for stopping the fire from spreading, can exacerbate these problems once the rainy season arrives. As a result CalFire has developed procedures for returning to the lines and putting in "erosion control features." This mostly involves redirecting water so that it can't gather enough speed to really cause the erosion of hillsides. Rehabilitation does not focus on the damage done by the fire itself, but instead on any secondary damage caused to the land by the firefighting efforts.